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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM—An American friend tells me that his friends are worried about those settlements in the West Bank.
Forget it.
It's all a distraction.
The American administration and media have learned from the Arabs. Maybe Obama is an Arab after all. Instead of attending to serious problems at home, he has focused on the image of Israeli evil that others have made into a problem.
A lead story on this morning's news is that he is visiting Morocco, and asking King Mohamed VI to help bring peace to Palestine and Israel.
That's what the Palestinian and other Arab leaders do when they cannot solve problems at home. They travel the world and have their picture taken looking somber while talking to other national leaders.
The lead headline in Ha'aretz says that the United States and Saudi Arabia are pressuring Syria to renounce its sovereignty over Shaba Farms, so Israel will agree to withdraw, the area can be assigned to Lebanon, and the deal will advance the cause of disarming Hizbollah.
Are they serious?
Shaba Farms is a postage stamp size piece of land of no importance to Israel, Syria, or Lebanon, which is one of the issues that Hizbollah uses to excite the crowds. If Syria and Israel decide to humor the United States by going along with its scheme, Hizbollah will use some other reason to keep its people chanting, waving their fists, and threatening to use their missiles.
If the American president really wanted to be a great national leader, he'd bang heads at home, downsize all those insurance companies, and create a health system like those in all the other developed countries.
Nothing Israel can put on the table is enough for the Palestinians to accept, or even to use as a reasonable beginning for negotiations. Prime Minister Olmert offered something like 95 percent of the West Bank, plus land from Israel to compensate for the other 5 percent; plus a land link between
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Gaza and the West Bank; plus the acceptance of 30,000 refugees; plus international control of the Old City.
Mahmoud Abbas' responded that the "gaps remained large."
I read that as saying that he cannot accept anything without arousing his Palestinian rivals, and he is not willing to do that despite being in a condition of civil war with them.
Perhaps the key to understanding all of this is to realize that Palestine does not exist. Neither do Palestinians. They are just a bunch of Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, but are not a society that anyone can govern or reason with.
The Palestine Authority is running a deficit of $300 million, and is trying to borrow $530 million from banks in order to pay employees. Their salaries feed something like 25 percent of the population. The Authority is hardly more than a welfare organization, providing a living to people not being supported by the United Nations.
Perhaps it is only the Obama White House that views the Palestinians as a serious enterprise. Arab governments have delivered only 25 percent of what they pledged.
I have seen no list of banks willing to lend them $530 million. It is too late to qualify for a sub-prime mortgage.
Silwan is an Arab neighborhood east of the Old City. A feud between rival families escalated to automatic weapons. There is at least one dead, several injured, and considerable property damage. Residents are complaining that the fire department, police, and paramedics did not respond.
Why should they risk themselves?
Am I mad to suggest that Palestine is not a real issue? If the authorities take away my e-mail and lock me up, I will not be the first individual put away for telling the truth.
Nor would I be the only mad Jew.
There was yet another weekend of violent demonstrations about the opening of a parking garage on the Sabbath. As usual in such confrontations, the primary weapons are curses, stones, overturned dumpsters, and dirty diapers. The police tried to keep the ultra-Orthodox in their ghetto, using barricades and their cavalry horses.
Pardon my flippancy. Today I am not dealing with serious topics.
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